Hey, Chevy Chase used to be funny!

Insert obvious joke about Chevy's career.

Since he's now been relegated to a minor supporting character on Community, it's easy to forget that Chevy Chase was once funny. Heck, all of his best work - Caddyshack, Fletch, Saturday Night Live - came out either well before or near my birth date in 1984. (I'll wait for some of you to come back from hanging yourselves.)

His demotion isn't exactly undeserved. Even on Community, his character has seemingly been scaled back because he simply isn't as funny as the younger comedians. Because he kind of looks the same, it's easy to forget that he's 66, and that a lot of his former SNL co-stars either work reduced schedules (Bill Murray) or are similarly damaged by drugs (Garrett Morris) or are dead (Belushi). Chase simply surviving to this point, given his immense cocaine problems in the past, is surprising.

However, I recently stumbled across the old Chevy Chase NBC specials on the Internets, and it is amazing how much of a fastball he had then. From 1975 and 1977, there is a dry sort of humor that is well ahead of its time. There is stilted, awkward dialogue, the sort of which Adult Swim and Space Ghost and Archer would use 30 years later, along with traditional sketches. The drug humor is also far toned down from the first season of SNL. (People tend to deify that first season, but for every great Samurai Delicatessen sketch, there is one where everyone is loaded and slurring through their lines.)

I'm guessing the specials are so good because there are only three of them. Heck, even Charlie Murphy was great for two episodes of Chappelle's Show. Without Dave and Neil Brennan editing? Eh, not so much. The specials give a glimpse at Chevy's incredible talents, and it is just a shame so much of it vanished up his nostrils.

On an unrelated note, the specials also have a really, really young and hipster Martin Mull in them. It's hard to imagine him as an actual comedian now, given all of his supporting roles - he has been in 111 freakin' things! I'll always remember him as Col. Mustard from the Clue movie though, which only I seemed to love.

What if Bill Cosby never hit it big?

I guess the real reason that my wife and I had children is the same reason that Napoleon had for invading Russia: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

While I think Dave Chappelle is the best active comedian out there, since I love every stand-up performance of his I can get my hands on, a review of a legend begs the question - What if Bill Cosby had never stopped doing stand-up?

When I was a kid, I used to ride around with my grandfather, a big tall guy with a shock of white hair. (He still looks that way to this day, even though he has to be in his 70s or 80s by now. And yeah, I don't know his exact age; ages and birthdays are a huge, huge blind spot in my knowledge.) He had a cassette player, and while I had no idea what kind of music he listened to, he had two tapes I loved to listen to, both by Cosby - Himself and For Adults Only.

Although For Adults Only sounded like the worse album, Himself is actually worse. The opening skit is all about drugs, like pot and cocaine. Lest you think my grandfather was corrupting me, he had the clean versions of both tapes. I was shocked years later when I listen to the performances and found this out, but Clean Cosby and Dirty Cosby are pretty similar, since the material (drugs, sex) changes more than his language, which is almost always clean.

Minus the filth, Cosby mostly joked about common experiences anyone could relate to. From Himself, there were legendary sequences on having chocolate cake for breakfast, visiting the dentist and catching his kids - girls - trying to pee standing up like daddy. The signature moment of For Adults Only concerns Cosby's concerns of why a single egg costs $0.89 from a hotel room service. (But hey, at least it is served "any style", right?)

After my adolescence, I lost touch with Cosby for a while, until my buddy Eric noted he was back into him. This reinvigorated my own interest, and I stumbled upon the 1965 classic Why Is There Air?, which remains my favorite CD of his to this day. The title track is splendid, as are his stories about his $75 car, his psychologist shop teacher guilting confessions out of classmates, and best of all, playing for Temple football against Hofstra.

However, because of the success of The Cosby Show, Cosby kind of stopped producing as much stand-up, which is a shame. In the 1960s, he produced 10 records. In the 1970s, he was down to eight, some of which was Fat Albert stuff. He only managed two in the 1980s, one of which was Himself thankfully, and just one in the 1990s.

If you remove the television option from Cosby's career, then I think he develops similar to a guy with much, much different material - George Carlin. Carlin was known almost exclusively for his stand-up, excluding short stints as a Saturday Night Live host, Rufus in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and Mr. Conductor on Shining Time Station. (This of course setup my favorite late Carlin joke: "You know what I say? Fuck the children! They're getting entirely too much attention. And I know what some of you are thinking: 'Jesus, he's not going to attack children, is he?' Yes he is! He's going to attack children. And remember, this is Mr. Conductor talking; I know what I'm talking about.")

The Philosophy of the Flying V

Uh oh, look at all these wacky kids! You know craziness will ensue!

Sometimes I forget that other people on the Internet, you know, write stuff. But by chance, I stumbled upon this blog the other day, which is really quite grand, and specifically, this post, about the top 10 selfish sports teams of the 1990s. The relevant overlap to this post I'm crafting right now would be the following paragraph about D2: The Mighty Ducks:

Question: How does a team that barely makes it to the post season in their crappy neighborhood hockey league get selected to represent our nation in the Junior Olympic Goodwill games? Coach Gordon Bombay that's how. I understand hiring Bombay as your coach. The man is an innovator, I mean the flying V? Come on, that's just good hockey. But why choose the whole Mighty Ducks team for Team USA? You're going to tell me that Goldberg was the best goalie our country had to offer?

I concur with bricksexplode (or Josh, his actual name). (And also, creepily enough, he and I have practically the same take and story about Wake Up Ron Burgandy.) Even as a 10-year-old kid, the second Mighty Ducks movie was so implausible to me that it ruined all of the good feelings created in the first one. The series morphed from a plausible story of a team of misfits to a ridiculous farce of a movie with no basis in reality. The final installment is actually somewhat realistic, but I am apparently the only person in the world who enjoys watching it.

The first movie, while no cinematic masterpiece, was a great movie of its type. Just about any kid can relate to being a sort of outcast portrayed in the movie, especially a geeky young kid like myself. Even though I never had (and still haven't) ice skated, there are obvious parallels between other sports and other movies - Little League (The Bad News Bears), Pop Warner football (Little Giants, even though it came out later), basketball (... um, I'm sure there is one I'm forgetting).

It also had a memorable cast of characters with easily-identifiable counterparts in my everyday life. While they weren't exact matches with my friends, there were shared traits: the brash-talking Jessie, the smart-alecky Averman, the fat kid no one actually wanted to hang out with (Goldberg), and the big tough guy Fulton.

D1 is the classic underdog tale, on ice, and you feel great when they win the championship. The story is as predictible as a Subway sandwich - what else would you expect from Disney, or from a $5 footlong? - but ultimately somewhat believable and satisfying.

The second is just pure "let's make a buck!" fuckery that made me eventually dislike all these movies from Disney. As bricksexplode brings up, the most ludicrous idea is that a team that barely made the playoffs in a Minnesota youth hockey league would represent the United States. I grew up in the woods of Rhode Island, and even our Little League all-star team that would try to qualify for the Little League World Series would be a combination of the best players from all the league's teams. (Speaking to my athletic prowess as a kid, I never came close to making one.)

Deciding to just reunite the whole team is so transparent and shitty, and the opening scenes are some of the worst of the movie. Looking back at it as a 25-year-old, there are a couple plausible ways you could do it. First, instead of setting the movie in Los Angeles, why not have these games come to Minnesota? Then it is more plausible that you'd have to use the Ducks. Or, failing that, at least have some flashback scenes with the Ducks winning a couple regional tournaments and earning their way to L.A. Or, because the kids all live in the same area, and are roughly the same age, why not just have the sequel take place (brace yourself) a year later? Because I had played Little League, D2 immediately seemed fake to me, because even as a kid I realized that shit with L.A. would never happen.

Okay though, looking past that - What the fuck did Iceland ever do to you, Disney? Like, seriously, it is bad enough that they have a horrible, false country name (according to weather.com, Iceland is roughly the same weather-wise as New England right now). Hey Mouse, why do you have to shit all over them by making them the obviously-Soviet Union inspired enemy? Either make up a fake country or leave the Icelanders alone.

Anyway, the Ducks recruit some players from other parts of the country for no good reason. I mean, non-movie, they're to include some non-white people in the cast, but in-movie, Gordon Bombay hates them and barely plays any of them. I don't think most return for the third movie, which is great, except for the Goon, who is clearly not even close to being the right age for D2 and D3. The Ducks also recruit a young, trash-talking Kenan Thompson in his film debut, and he is kind of OK despite using a preposterous shot. Also, really, he's playing street hockey out in L.A.? Not basketball? Not skateboarding? Not surfing? L.A. does have that intense hockey tradition, after all.

The whole movie is effing absurd, and if you like D2 the most out of the three, I don't know what's wrong with you. Pull yourself together! Oddly enough, I think it was too much overt zaniness even for Disney, because they went the opposite direction for D3. I actually like that movie because it is super serious and (shockingly) focuses on hockey from time to time. It is plausible (at least in terms of the movie world) that a private school would recruit the Ducks, because the dominant Rhode Island private schools mostly cherry pick their athletes from Rhode Island public schools. D3 also has some redeeming value with the introduction of their new coach. He lacks the charm of Gordon Bombay, but he is an interesting character at least.